Boardgames as educational tools

In the past few months I have been exploring the training industry as a possible new career path. Suddenly my Facebook feed was flooded with all sorts of ads related to training. So many gurus offering free two to three hour seminars, on property investment, stocks trading, digital marketing, entrepreneurship, and so on. I went to some of these. These free seminars are all preview sessions, i.e. marketing sessions where they try to sell you their non-free workshop or training. All of them sounded a little dodgy to me. Perhaps it was because I recognised the many techniques they used to encourage (a.k.a. psycho) people to sign up, like saying how expensive the course originally is and just for today only you get this special price. In one case the presenter set a 7-minute countdown clock at the end of his talking, and said if you signed up before time ran out, you'd get some extra stuff. All these techniques only made me more skeptical. The presentations were spectacular and entertaining, but was what they sold really effective? It sounded too good to be true. In the end, I signed up for one of these courses.

The most well-known boardgame used in trainings is probably Robert Kiyosaki's Cashflow 101. Robert Kiyosaki is the author of Rich Dad Poor Dad. I have not read the book or played the game myself. What I have now is this game below called Leverage.

Allen gave this to me when he heard I was considering getting into the training business. This was a game from his friend who attended a business training course. The game was played during the course, and Allen's friend bought a copy. It was quite expensive, and I imagine the training course was probably very expensive too.

I have not played this game, and I do not intend to. Strictly speaking, I should not comment on it. My opinions on it are purely based on reading the rules and looking at the game components. Let's take a look at how it plays.

The game board has a circular track. Every player has a pawn which moves along the track based on a die roll. When you land on a space, you draw a card from a deck indicated by the space, and you do what the card says. This game simulates running a business. The text on the cards are all related to business situations. When your pawn passes a Profit space, this represents your business having run for one month, and you collect a monthly profit. If you have taken an overdraft, you must pay interest.

There are 10 types of cards in the game. 5 of them are called marketing leverage cards. They help you improve some aspect of your sales, and increase your monthly income. 4 of the card types are called business leverage cards. They are on the outside of the track. They represent important aspects related to growing and sustaining your business, e.g. IT systems, staff training and logistics. To win the game, you must achieve two things. You must have a monthly income of at least $100,000, and your business leverage value in all four areas must be at least 5 points. The 10th card type is the Oops card. These are unforeseen disasters that hurt your business.

These are the marketing leverage cards. They all describe various ways a business can improve its sales. This content is what the game is trying to teach the players. In game terms, the general function of these cards are similar. You are given the choice of investing a certain amount of money, for the chance of increasing one of the KPI's of your business. If you decide to gamble, you flick a spinner to see how much your KPI increases. In the best case, it increases by 10%. If you are unlucky, you gain nothing.

These are the business leverage cards. Sometimes you have the opportunity to increase one business leverage value by 1 or 2 points, at a cost. You may sell the rights to an opponent at a mutually agreed price. Sometimes the card is put up for auction, and everyone may bid for it.

If you land on a Bonus space, you may pick any card type to draw.

That's the spinner on the left, and the rulebook on the right.

At the start of the game, everyone draws a random profession card. Your profession card determines the starting parameters of your business. That long sequence of calculations is how you calculate your monthly income. It is another thing the game intends to teach. Every profession card has a different combination of business leverage values (they don't start at zero). The profession card also specifies your overdraft limit. That business at the lower right has no overdraft facility.

After you draw your profession card, you write down all the important starting parameters on your record sheet. This is the front page of your record sheet, where you write your starting situation.

This is the back of your record sheet. Every time you increase one of your marketing leverage KPI's, you calculate your new monthly income here.

I think the paper money in the game is decent. The design is loud and clear.

These are the Oops cards. Some force you to lose turns. Some make you lose money. Some lower your KPI's.

I think this is a very luck-heavy game. It's mostly a roll-and-move game after all, not all that different from Snakes and Ladders. You do have opportunities to make decisions, but you don't really have many meaningful decisions. When you draw a marketing leverage card, you get to decide whether to buy it. In most cases you probably should, because that's how you make progress. I can only imagine not buying when you are short on money and need to wait for the next monthly income. It actually doesn't matter which marketing leverage KPI you are going to bet on increasing. All five KPI's are multiplied to get your monthly income. When you increase one KPI, you multiply it with a certain percentage increase. Since everything is being multiplied, it doesn't matter which KPI. If I look at this from a game design perspective, this is quite stupid and pointless, like all resources are wood in Catan. But remember, the purpose is actually communicating those five KPI's to the players - the students. This game is not about playing a game. It is about teaching business.

Another opportunity for making decisions is when you draw a business leverage card. If it is something you lack, you probably should buy it. If it is something you don't need but someone else needs it, you probably want to sell it at as high a price as possible, unless he is close to winning and you need to deny him. If it comes to an auction, how you value the card very much depends on how lacking you are in that particular business leverage area. Not exactly rocket science. I have not analysed the cost distribution of the various cards. If the distribution is different for different types of cards, it may be an additional factor to consider when making decisions.

I have no urge to try this game myself. I study it only out of curiosity, to see what a training tool boardgame is like. It is certainly very different from what I usually play. It serves a different purpose, and it should not be assessed based on its entertainment value. If it conveys the lesson effectively, and people remember the lesson for a long time afterwards, it has done its job.

Here's another training tool game. I have played this one, during a training course I attended. It is a two-player game. The play area is a network of nodes with terminals along the edges. It is played within a 5-minute time limit, and the players may not speak or communicate in any way. You may play as many times as you want within the 5 minutes, and you take turns to be the start player. There is only one pawn on the board, and it always starts at the centre. You take turns moving the pawn one step. The pawn must not visit the same node more than once. Your goal is to move the pawn to a terminal on your turn. It's a very simple game.

Soon after my opponent and I started, I realised that when played competently, the start player would always lose, due to the design of the network. Both players would avoid setting up the other to win, resulting in the pawn moving in a big circle. Eventually it would run out of options, and be forced into a terminal. I pondered the lesson behind the game as I played. It was telling us that the whole point was to not compete. If we played competitively, a game took rather long to play, and our total wins would be low by the time the 5 minutes was up. If we played cooperatively and took turns to win, we would be able to play many games and score many victories. It was win-win. Once I realised this, I adjusted my method of play. When it was my "opponent's" turn to win, I helped her instead of playing against her, sending the pawn in a straight line to a terminal. Unfortunately she hadn't yet worked out what was going on, and I couldn't tell her due to the no talking rule. When it was my turn to win, she still played normally, which dragged the game. When time ran out, we didn't do very well.

After this exercise, the whole classroom compared scores, and one particular team outscored everybody else by a huge margin. One of the teammates was a German guy, Martin, and he too had figured out what was going on. However, he handled the situation in a different way from mine. Regardless of whose turn it was to win, he always selflessly made the pawn take the shortest path to the nearest terminal. When he started to do this, his "opponent" very quickly racked up many wins. She didn't yet fully understand the situation. However due to Martin's generosity, she felt compelled to also let him win sometimes. That was how their team went on to score many more points in total than the rest of us. I certainly learned something from this experience. Had I been smarter about this, and less insistent on taking turns to win, I could have achieved what Martin's team did. The lesson behind all this is in order to be successful, you must help others to be successful. Give, and you will receive. Great successes are built on a collaborative mindset.

As a game, this is poor design. A game where the start player always loses is a stupid one. However what I learned from it was valuable, and would stay with me for a long time. That is the true value of the game, or rather, this exercise. We probably should not think of this as a game. It is called a game because people associate a game with fun. It makes people feel relaxed. It makes people think it is something easy to do. It takes away seriousness.

When we say the phrase "educational game", we all know it comes with a negative connotation. The first thing that comes to mind is this game is going to be boring. Sometimes educational games fail to be fun, or educational, which is rather sad. There are certainly boring and ineffective educational games. In some cases, they are not as bad as we think. They are bad because we evaluate them based on entertainment value. Most gamers would scoff at those pricey business training games. At these prices, you can buy a dozen fantastic games. I find it amusing to examine some of these educational games. It's novel to me, because the games we play are so very different.